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This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scor

by mabbo 8y ago

This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted. Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair. Sure, there's things like sports scholarships or the super rich kids whose parents donated a building, etc, but that's a small percentage. The school can just admit those admissions are unfair and be honest about it.

apetresc 8y ago
> This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted. > > Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair. That strikes me as very naive. Having "grade > X" (presumably you mean high school grades, right?) is entirely based on how your high school grades, for which there is voluminous data that it is extremely racially biased based on districting, etc. This simply passes the incentives for corruption one step earlier in the process, to people who are even less invested in the outcome than the universities themselves are.
- mabbo 8y ago
  Fair point. But surely somewhere out there is some metric that can calculate a students likelihood of succeeding at University but also isn't easy to cheat at.
  - apetresc 8y ago
    Something other than a human evaluation of a student's entire resume, which is what we have now? No, it's not at all obvious to me that such a thing is possible. That's basically tantamount to fortune-telling.
bunderbunder 8y ago
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The grade/score threshold itself is easy to game, which is a big part of why universities generally use a rubric that encourages the admissions department to look at other things as well. For example, because of a quirk in how the grade point system in one of the high schools I went to worked, it was very nearly a mathematical impossibility for kids who took an extra class instead of a study hall period to make it to the top echelons of the honor roll. Creating a strategy where, for example, helicopter parents who wanted to see their kid named valedictorian would forbid them from taking that extra class, since doing so would have knocked them out of the running. Similarly, the college admissions exams are well-known to be poor predictors of academic aptitude. A big chunk of what they measure is simply how much money your parents spent on prep programs and tutors. This is even before we start digging into the muddy waters about the extent to which grades and test scores unintentionally measure factors related to socioeconomic background rather than academic aptitude, though there does seem to be a pretty robust body of research around that morass as well.

by mabbo 8y ago

apetresc 8y ago

> This makes me think more and more that the right way to handle too many applications to a school is a lottery system. Simply put, all students with (grades/scores > X) qualify for the school get put into a lottery. The winners are admitted. > > Lotteries are hard to bribe, hard to accuse of racial bias, and hard to call unfair. That strikes me as very naive. Having "grade > X" (presumably you mean high school grades, right?) is entirely based on how your high school grades, for which there is voluminous data that it is extremely racially biased based on districting, etc. This simply passes the incentives for corruption one step earlier in the process, to people who are even less invested in the outcome than the universities themselves are.

mabbo 8y ago
Fair point. But surely somewhere out there is some metric that can calculate a students likelihood of succeeding at University but also isn't easy to cheat at.
- apetresc 8y ago
  Something other than a human evaluation of a student's entire resume, which is what we have now? No, it's not at all obvious to me that such a thing is possible. That's basically tantamount to fortune-telling.

bunderbunder 8y ago

We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The grade/score threshold itself is easy to game, which is a big part of why universities generally use a rubric that encourages the admissions department to look at other things as well. For example, because of a quirk in how the grade point system in one of the high schools I went to worked, it was very nearly a mathematical impossibility for kids who took an extra class instead of a study hall period to make it to the top echelons of the honor roll. Creating a strategy where, for example, helicopter parents who wanted to see their kid named valedictorian would forbid them from taking that extra class, since doing so would have knocked them out of the running. Similarly, the college admissions exams are well-known to be poor predictors of academic aptitude. A big chunk of what they measure is simply how much money your parents spent on prep programs and tutors. This is even before we start digging into the muddy waters about the extent to which grades and test scores unintentionally measure factors related to socioeconomic background rather than academic aptitude, though there does seem to be a pretty robust body of research around that morass as well.